A blog on crisis communications best practices, emergency information and social media in emergency management ... an open forum for exchanging ideas and experience on emergency info and SMEM..
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED WITHIN ARE MINE AND DO NOT REPRESENT OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT POLICY OR THE VIEWS OF MY EMPLOYER.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Mission Possible ... holding an #smem congress

Your mission, should you chose to
accept it .... is to promote the holding of the first #smem congress.

Now, I'm on a bit of a crusade. I've
recently started thinking what it would be like to gather the top 100
people related to the #smem hashtag. (social media in emergency
management). There is no limit to what could be achieved in promoting
community resilience, effective disaster planning, efficient crisis
communications and stimulate further citizen and volunteer
involvement, if we could get all of them is a single locale for even
just a day. The key: refining the use of social media, mobile technologies and the power of the crowd and the cloud as force multipliers for GOOD ... for safer and stronger cities, towns and countries ...

I'm thinking we could have groups
focusing on:

social media in all pillars of EM
...from preparedness to recovery

social media as situational
enhancement and decision-making support tools

crowdsourcing and crisis mapping

social media, emergency
information and crisis communications

That's just the tip of the SMEM iceberg
really ... there are fantastic people out there who share great
stories and practices on a daily basis. I'm thinking the synergies
that could be gained by increasing the power of online networking
with stronger human contacts resulting from a face-to-face, IRL (in
real-life) meeting could be the start of a paradigm shift.

So, I call on all of us ... to work our
contacts ... make noise, so we can attract the attention and obtain
the largess of a white knight ... a giant that could make this a
reality ... There must be some benefits from behemoths such as
Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and others ... in sponsoring
such a gathering ...

I think it'd be easy to form a working
group with 5-6 people who could put a list of the top 100 together
...